KANO (Nigeria): Mahmud Zubairu scrutinises the computer screen in front of him, watching the progress of healthcare workers as they fan out across Nigeria’s northern Kano state where polio runs high.

The dozens of teams are going door-to-door to immunise every child aged under five, as part of an aggressive push to eradicate the debilitating disease.

But this is a campaign with a difference, as Zubairu, a doctor and coordinator of the vaccination project, can follow the workers remotely in real time thanks to state-of-the-art technology.

“It is now easy to monitor the immunisation coverage of each vaccination team because the phone trackers each team carries along generate tracks which are sent via satellite to our website,” the medical doctor said.

“That enables us to compute with a high degree of precision the number of houses the vaccinators have covered each day during a campaign.”

Zubairu works out of an office in the city of Kano used by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has pledged to help wipe out the disease across the globe. While the phone-tracking idea is the brainchild of the World Health Organisation (WHO), the billionaire Microsoft founder and his wife’s charitable foundation are helping to fund the four-year project.

Kano state has been targeted because of its high prevalence of polio and because many parents — suspicious of immunisation programmes — still reject the vaccine, meaning the number of home visits to administer jabs is low.

“The tracking is all in a bid to increase vaccination coverage and ensure good supervision,” said Zubairu.

Yellow electronic dots appear on the satellite maps of each of Kano’s six target districts every time a vaccination team stays at a location for more than two minutes.

Green horizontal and vertical grid lines divide an area into squares, with each box representing a house.

“If no tracks are found in any box it means that house was not visited, and by that you can compute the number of houses covered and the percentage of coverage without being overwhelmed by the number of valid tracks generated in an area visited by vaccinators,” Zubairu explained.

In one section, the screen shows that only half of the houses were visited despite a succession of yellow dots on the Google Maps software.

Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan are the world’s last three countries where polio remains endemic and as such are the focus of efforts to eradicate the disease,

which has also seen a sharp rise in Somalia and Syria as law and order and infrastructure broke down in both countries.

Between 2003 and 2004, Kano state suspended polio immunisation for 13 months following claims by some Muslim clerics and doctors that the vaccine was laced with substances that could render girls infertile.

They alleged the immunisation programme was part of a US-led Western plot to depopulate Africa. Similar claims have been made by Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.—AFP